Opinion Contributor

FDR and Churchill plot D-Day, May 19, 1943

On this day in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, meeting at the White House, set a date for the cross-channel landing into northern France that would become D-Day. The date they chose, May 1, 1944, turned out to be premature. It took another five weeks for the invasion — by 29 American, British and Canadian divisions, as well as a Free French division — to occur.

Addressing a joint session of Congress on his second wartime visit to the Capitol, Churchill warned that the real danger facing the Allies was “dragging-out of the war at enormous expense.” They risked, he said, becoming “tired or bored or split,” which would play into the hands of the German and Japanese.

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“It is the duty of those who are charged with the direction of the war,” Churchill said, “to overcome at the earliest moment the military, geographical and political difficulties and begin the process so necessary and desirable of laying the cities and other munitions centers of Japan in ashes; for in ashes, they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world.”

“Let no one suggest,” Churchill continued, “that we British have not at least as great an interest as the United States in the unflinching and relentless waging of war against Japan. But I am here to tell you that we will wage that war side by side with you, in accordance with the best strategic employment of our forces while there is breath in our bodies and while blood flows in our veins.

“The African war is over. Mussolini’s African Empire and Corporal Hitler’s strategy are alike exploded. One continent at least has been cleansed and purged forever from Fascist and Nazi tyranny.”

The lawmakers greeted Churchill’s speech with tumultuous applause.

SOURCE: “THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL: DEFENDER OF THE REALM, 1940-1965,” BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER (2010)